Liz Hoffman

You are a local boy, so we all want to know how close, if ever, did you get to becoming head coach of the Toronto Maple Leafs?

Well, the only story I can share with you is that I was interviewed by Ken Dryden on the recommendation of Liz Hoffman.

Liz was the director of athletics at the University of Toronto when I was coaching there.

And she and Ken were on some kind of... committee.

Gloria Steinem, who passed away today here in New York, 92 years of age.

And speaking of women reporters, I saw this article today that Semaphore, Liz Hoffman is the business editor for Semaphore, and I think she does a great job.

She wrote a piece today that I thought, it's great.

She said, bring back the dunce caps.

The Clippers will forfeit their next five first-round draft picks as penance for giving Kweli Leonard a bunch of no-show jobs that were steered his way by the owner of the Clippers, Steve Ballmer, who was one of the early guys and made his money in Microsoft.

So what Ballmer did was pay Claudia Leonard more money under the table, if you will.

And so as Liz Hoffman writes, the $30 million fine that the NBA assessed to the Clippers is only worth about $10 worth of dividends that Ballmer clips from his Microsoft stock, but that the draft picks will likely exile the team to irrelevance for years to come.

And it's one of those where corporate watchdogs, if you're really wanting to to crack down on violations of insiders' stock trading and on and on and on.

Well, where we're left, I think, is back where we started.

Can Mark Walter extricate himself from what Liz Hoffman in Semafor called, quote, "A dragon's nest of interlocking loans," end quote.

The sale of the Lakers to Joshua Kushner, who's the brother of the president's son-in-law, and Bob Iger, the longtime CEO of the Walt Disney Company, which owns ESPN, certainly would take a chunk out of the $20 billion-plus that Walter needs.

Except that Jeanie Buss, the daughter of longtime Lakers owner Dr. Jerry Buss, is contesting the sale.